NATO: A feast of blood

Published Jun 6, 2011 8:38 PM

By Cynthia McKinneyTripoli, Libya

Following are excerpts from a May 26 article received by Clarity Press. Read the entire article
at http://tinyurl.com/4y98ot3.

Founded in 1945 at the end of World War II, NATO was founded by the United
States in response to the Soviet Union’s survival as a communist state.
NATO was the U.S. insurance policy that capitalist ownership and domination of
European, Asian and African economies would continue.

With that as background, last night’s NATO rocket attack on Tripoli is
inexplicable. A civilian metropolitan area of around 2 million people, Tripoli
sustained 22 to 25 bombings last night, rattling and breaking windows and
glass, and shaking the foundation of my hotel.

I left my room at the Rexis Al Nasr Hotel and walked outside the hotel, and I
could smell the exploded bombs. There were local people everywhere milling with
foreign journalists from around the world. As we stood there more bombs struck
around the city. The sky flashed red with explosions and more rockets from NATO
jets cut through low clouds before exploding.

I could taste the thick dust stirred up by the exploded bombs. I immediately
thought about the depleted uranium munitions reportedly being used here —
along with white phosphorus. If depleted uranium weapons were being used, what
[would be the] effect on the local civilians?

Women carrying young children ran out of the hotel. Others ran to wash the dust
from their eyes. With sirens blaring, emergency vehicles made their way to the
scene of the attack. Car alarms, set off by the repeated blasts, could be heard
underneath the defiant chants of the people.

Sporadic gunfire broke out, and it seemed everywhere around me. Euronews showed
video of nurses and doctors chanting even at the hospitals as they treated
those injured from NATO’s latest installation of shock and awe. Suddenly,
the streets around my hotel became full of chanting people, car horns blowing.
Inside the hotel, one Libyan woman carrying a baby came to me and asked me:
“Why are they doing this to us?”

I am confident that NATO would not have been so reckless with human life if
they had [been] called on to attack a major Western city.

Only the day before, at a women’s event in Tripoli, one woman came up to
me with tears in her eyes. Her mother is in Benghazi, and she can’t get
back to see if her mother is OK or not. People from the east and west of the
country lived with each other, loved each other, intermarried, and now, because
of NATO’s “humanitarian intervention,” artificial divisions
are becoming hardened. NATO’s recruitment of allies in eastern Libya
smacks of the same strain of cold warriorism that sought to assassinate Fidel
Castro and overthrow the Cuban Revolution with “homegrown” Cubans
willing to commit acts of terror against their former home country.

More recently, Democratic Republic of Congo has been amputated de facto after
Laurent Kabila refused a request from the Clinton administration to formally
shave off the eastern part of his country. This plan to balkanize and amputate
an African country (as has been done in Sudan) did not work because Kabila said
“no” while Congolese around the world organized to protect the
“territorial integrity” of their country.

What is quite clear is this: What I experienced last night is no
“humanitarian intervention.”

Many suspect it is about all the oil under Libya. Call me skeptical, but I have
to wonder why the combined armed sea, land and air forces of NATO and the U.S.
costing billions of dollars are being arraigned against a relatively small
North African country, and we’re expected to believe it’s in the
defense of democracy.

What I have seen of long lines to get fuel is not “humanitarian
intervention.” Refusal to allow purchases of medicine for the hospitals
is not “humanitarian intervention.”

People around the world need us to stand up and speak out for ourselves and
them because Iran and Venezuela are also in the cross-hairs. Libyans
don’t need NATO helicopters, gunships, smart bombs, cruise missiles and
depleted uranium to settle their differences. NATO’s “humanitarian
intervention” needs to be exposed for what it is with the bright, shining
light of the truth.

Stop bombing Africa and the poor of the world!

Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.